


The Echoes of Mars

by fid_gin



Series: The Loved 'verse [21]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-12
Updated: 2014-04-12
Packaged: 2018-01-19 03:13:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1453306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fid_gin/pseuds/fid_gin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The other Doctor fixed him with his intense gaze. "Echoes," he said, drawing the word out. "Ripples, from a damaged timeline. All coming from here." He jerked his head back toward Mars, and the Doctor's eyes widened in horror. "Getting it now, are you?"</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Echoes of Mars

**Author's Note:**

> Original post date: 11/26/2009
> 
> _"Time is, to put it in its most impressive and some might say poncy-sounding form, my domain. I can see things that once happened, even if they haven't happened any more...the other timeline leaves echoes, ripples, if you look hard enough."_  
>  \-- _The Stone Rose_ by Jacqueline Rayner

The Doctor awoke with Rose in his arms, and noticed his Time Lord counterpart absent from their bed. There was nothing unusual about that; the other man didn't require sleep except in extremely rare instances, and the Doctor knew that he got antsy and bored lying still for long periods of time, watching himself and Rose as they dozed peacefully. So he'd rise, and he'd go tinker, or read, or build, and when they woke later they'd seek him out and he'd smile brilliantly at them before making some cheeky comment about humans and the amount of sleep they required.

It was different this time, though, the Doctor felt. He wasn't able to describe how he knew, with no empathic abilities and no mental link with the other man that he could feel, but he awoke with the unshakeable certainty that something wasn't right, like a stone in his belly. Something was wrong, and the other Doctor was missing, and the Doctor felt the cold-bath sensation of fear wash over him.

He kicked blankets off of his long legs and rose to pull on his blue trousers. Rose mumbled in her sleep, then rolled over and silenced again, and the Doctor crept shirtless and barefoot from the bedroom after checking to make sure he hadn't disturbed her. Whatever it was he was feeling, it was accompanied by the sense that this was something between himself and the other Doctor, that the other man would not want Rose to know.

The Doctor passed the library and their workshop, feeling drawn toward the control room. Entering the circular chamber, he saw that it was awash in red warning lights instead of the customary warm green, and an alarm rang around the confines of the room. Full of concern for his ship, the Doctor ran to the centre console to run diagnostics, stroking her coral and making soothing noises in the back of his throat as he did so.

"She feels it, too." The other Doctor's voice came suddenly from the direction of the doors, making the part-human Doctor jump nearly out of his skin. He peered around the time rotor and looked down the ramp in that direction, and immediately saw a secondary source of the eerie red glow.

The other Doctor stood at the open doors of the TARDIS, the scarlet globe of Mars floating before him out in the reaches of space. His hands were thrust deep in the pockets of his brown trousers, and he leaned against one door frame, just staring at the planet before him. The Doctor walked slowly up behind him, transfixed by the visible tension in his twin's body, and the terrible beauty of the landscape visible through the doors.

"The Red Planet," he said softly.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?" the other Doctor answered, still not turning.

The part-human Doctor felt vulnerable in the face of the scene before him: the angry, crimson planet and the powerful and obviously distressed Time Lord observing it. The fear that had woken him coursed through him again and he shivered, crossing his arms over his bare chest. The other Doctor slowly swivelled his head toward him, and there was something dark and sparkling behind his eyes. Something not quite sane. For the first time that he could remember, it occurred to the Doctor to be slightly afraid of his other self.

"And you felt it, too? Welllll...inherited residual low-level extra-sensory capability from my superior physiology amplified by the regeneration energy absorbed through the metacrisis, that's to be expected."

"What is it?" he asked, not liking the shaky quality of his voice.

The other Doctor fixed him with his intense gaze. "Echoes," he said, drawing the word out. "Ripples, from a damaged timeline. All coming from here." He jerked his head back toward Mars, and the Doctor's eyes widened in horror. "Getting it now, are you?"

"Something we've done?" the Doctor asked, hoarsely, and the other Doctor shook his head.

"Not in this timeline. In our timeline, it never happened. Will never happen." As he spoke, the surface of the planet behind him suddenly erupted, a tiny pinpoint of red dust exploding out into a small mushroom cloud, and the Doctor could see the other man's eyes close, and the shudder which coursed through his body. "And there it is."

The Doctor gaped. "Is that Bowie Base One?"

"Yep," the other Doctor answered, popping the "P". "And in another future, I think I saved them."

"How? That's a fixed point." He saw that look in the other Doctor's eyes again, and he suddenly grasped what the other man was trying to tell him. "You broke the laws of time," he said, dazed. "That's what damaged the timeline. That's why it's bleeding through even though it never happened." Unconsciously, he took a step back, a step away from the other Doctor, and he registered the brief, hurt expression which flitted across his double's face.

The other Doctor turned his body fully to face him, leaving the doors open. "Don't you see, Doctor?" he said, his voice breaking. "That's what I became without you, without Rose. That's how close I am, to..." His voice trailed off, and the Doctor imagined how that sentence was going to end. To madness. To insanity. To becoming a monster. "Please," the other man said, finally, and the Doctor paused in his retreat. If the damage was bad enough that even _he_ with his diminished Gallifreyan biology could feel it, it must be unbearable for the Time Lord, that sick feeling that everything was just _wrong._

His heart broke for him, and he crossed back to the other Doctor, taking him in his arms. He could feel the other man's body shivering violently against his bare torso, his fingers clutching at his arms hard enough to leave bruises. Trailing kisses up the column of his neck, resting his lips just under his jaw, he felt the frantic double pulse there. "It's all right," he whispered against the other Doctor's throat, then his mouth, kissing him even as the explosion on the planet before them was still settling. The other Doctor kissed him back hungrily, sucking at his tongue and biting his lower lip before pulling away and holding his face still between his hands.

"You won't ever leave. Say it." The Doctor was no longer frightened or threatened, he just felt pity at the frantic anxiety in the identical face in front of him, and a fierce protectiveness of this man he used to be.

He tried to make his voice soothing, the way he would speak to a panicked animal. "We're never going to leave you," he repeated, staring straight into the other Doctor's eyes. "Whatever might've happened, it didn't. I'm here."

The other Doctor pulled him roughly back against him, smashing his lips against his, raking his hands through the Doctor's hair and tilting his head first one way, then the other as he continued tasting him. The part-human Doctor moaned into the other man's mouth, snaking his arms up around his neck and holding on for dear life. When they finally broke apart, he was gasping for breath.

He looked over the other Doctor's shoulder at the red orb spinning slowly in the distance. "It's freezing in here with these doors open," he said, thinking of Donna telling him the exact same thing once.

The other Doctor kissed him quickly one more time. "I'll warm you up," he said with a small smile before kneeling in front of him and beginning to work the fastenings of his trousers.

"Oh," the Doctor squeaked, reaching blindly behind him for a coral pillar to keep his balance. "We could go back to bed? Wake Rose."

The other man had undone the clasps and zip in front of his face and was kissing his way across the Doctor's stomach, over the tattoo on his hip, pumping his quickly-stiffening cock in one fist. "No," he heard him whisper, and felt the tickle of his breath across the light trail of hair under his belly button. "Just us this time." Then he felt the other Doctor's cool mouth envelop the head of his cock as he kept his hand wrapped around the base, following his lips with his fingers.

"Oh, God," the Doctor breathed, hanging onto the support structure behind him with one hand and reaching out to caress the top of the other Doctor's bobbing head with the other. He found it nearly impossible to tear his eyes away from the sight of his penis disappearing repeatedly into the Time Lord's mouth, and when he did manage to wrench his gaze away from that ridiculously erotic image, it was Mars he saw through the still-open doors of the TARDIS. Here he stood, bared to an entire planet, empty though it now might be, getting head from his duplicate in full view of open space. That thought was almost more exciting than the act itself, and he was suddenly very close.

The other Doctor's pace was relentless, and the Doctor could hear his own breath whistling in and out in high-pitched gasps. _"Ffffuck..."_ he groaned loudly as he started to come, his hips thrusting helplessly. The other man continued to suck and swallow around him until he was finished, then released him and stood.

He leaned in and kissed the Doctor deeply, and he savoured the trace notes of his own semen in the other Doctor's mouth as he reached down and began to unfasten the clasp on his brown trousers to return the favour. Reaching inside, he found that, incongruous with the activity he'd just been engaged in, the Time Lord was apparently not aroused, and his penis lay mostly soft against the thatch of his pubic hair. He looked into the other man's face in confusion.

"I'm..." the other Doctor started, sounding broken and vulnerable. "I don't know. I need..."

He understood, then. This moment wasn't about sex for the other man, not in the way that this sort of encounter was for them usually, at least. It was a cry for physical contact, for consolation, for reassurance that whatever personal hell he may have found himself living in another life which had driven him to this unthinkable act, it hadn't touched him in this one.

With one hand on a shoulder, he guided the other Doctor to where he himself had previously stood, facing Mars. With his other he continued gently fondling him, coaxing him erect. "Look at it," he whispered. "I know you wish you could have saved them. I know you stood here for a long time, thinking about it." The other Doctor buried his face in the Doctor's neck and whimpered as he continued to stroke him and his cock continued to harden within his hand. "But you wouldn't, even if I hadn't come out here, you wouldn't. You're not that person."

"I can feel it," the other Doctor bit out, his voice muffled, his hips moving, pushing his erection into his double's hand. "The reverberations through time...in another future, I did. Why would I do that?"

The Doctor held him close, one arm around him, his other hand moving faster. "Because you were alone," he answered after a moment. "For so long you, we, were so alone. But not any more."

"I almost was," the other Doctor gasped. "I left you and Rose..."

"Shhh." For the next few minutes the only sounds were the rustle and whisper of skin-on-skin as the Doctor's hand continued moving up and down, and the other Doctor's ragged breathing. Inspired, the Doctor began to whisper to the other man in Gallifreyan as he continued to work him, words with no English equivalents, words of comfort and love and home, until he finally came with a sharp cry. The Doctor felt the warm-wet surge over his hand, felt some of it spurt up over his bare stomach were the two men were nearly touching as the other Doctor's body shook and eventually sagged against him.

He wiped his his hand against his trousers as he kissed the other man's still-parted lips, then nodded his head back in the direction of their room. "C'mon," he said gently. The alarm had silenced and the red glow faded, the TARDIS apparently calmed by their displays of affection, and the other Doctor walked to the doors to pull them closed against Mars and the echoes of a future he'd only very narrowly avoided, then took his double's hand and let himself be led back to bed.

Rose awoke several hours later and flipped over to find her two Doctors belly-to-belly, locked in an embrace, her part-human Doctor naked from the waist up and sleeping soundly in the arms of his duplicate. The other Doctor's eyes were open, staring at the man across from him. They flicked over to Rose's when he realized that she was awake.

"I'd be lost without you, you know," he said solemnly. "Both of you."

She smiled warmly, budging up behind the Doctor in blue and throwing her arm over him to trace her fingers up the arm of the other Doctor. "We know," she said, sleepily.


End file.
